This is where the Dalai Lama will be coming in shortly (I kind of told you he was coming!). If mutability, adaptability, and creativity are three of our core characteristics and potentials as a species, the fourth is compassion, or to be more specific, joy in the positive participation in other people’s lives and a joy in gaining and maintaining an awareness of other people’s lives. These are the core concordive potentials that can bring us forward into a newer and better world, the kind of world where Miranda’s awestruck words in The Tempest will ring true: “Oh, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh, brave new world / That has such people in’t !” Yet I feel I must defend the notion of our compassion as a universal concordive potential, much as I must attack the myth of permanence. Of all the concordive potentials I have discussed, compassion has fallen most into doubt in our times. And where there is doubt without the antidote of belief, there is darkness. There is a reckless flailing about. There is abandonment. There is cunning without justice. There is power without balance, mind without measure. None of which are very promising advents for our future – and all of which are now regular and widespread phenomena in our society. Compassion is now seen (or at least portrayed) by many as an optional extra in life; an aspect that those with free time or resources or “a good heart” readily engage in, much like artistic expression is now seen as the pleasure and kingdom of the chosen few, but not the many who must live in the real world. Just think of the heartlessness of the characters in Seinfeld – it may have been a running joke, but it was a dark joke and a successful one because of the deep grain of truth that poked us hard in our conscience as well as our funny bone. We act as if compassion, like art, can and perhaps should be indulged in privately, in small moments, with our family and loved ones when the world is not bearing down on us with all its ponderous weight – but that it does not have a serious role to play in the crafting of our lives. Unless we are monks, of course! 

  

            It will be helpful here to compare and contrast the Dalai Lama’s concept of compassion as something which we should develop to the state of universal compassion for our own benefits as well as others’ (Ethics 123-124) with two other concepts of compassion: Christ’s famous formulation (and its context) and Mengzi’s ideas about compassion. I want to do this briefly in order to show that between three continents and two millennia there has existed a stable nexus of compatible ideas and observations on compassion that demonstrates the universal existence of compassion. For if it is true that man is highly mutable in how he expresses his essence, how he dwells in this world, then it will also be true that man’s expressions of the universal instinct for compassion will be highly variable and highly dependent on social norms and theories (yes, theories!) for the expression of compassion. And to put it mildly, our current social norms completely suck. But they don’t have to suck – and neither do we! Yet I also want to compare these three theories of compassion in order to more fully integrate and express my thoughts on our potentials, and to prepare the reader for my discussion afterwards on how external conditions play such a pivotal role in the actualization of our potentials and how we can control those external conditions.   

            So here I summon the Dalai Lama: in Ethics for the New Millennium, the Dalai Lama vigorously defends the necessary and ubiquitous role of compassion in our lives, and not merely in a wistful sense. He writes

Let us now consider the role of compassionate love and kind-heartedness in our daily lives. Does the ideal of developing it to the point where it is unconditional mean that we must abandon our own interests entirely? Not at all. In fact, it is the best way of serving them – indeed, it could even be said to constitute the wisest course for fulfilling self-interest. For if it is correct that those qualities such as love, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness are what happiness consists in, and if it is also correct that nying je, or compassion, as I have defined it, is both the source and the fruit of these qualities, then the more we are compassionate, the more we provide for our own happiness. Thus any idea that concern for others, though a noble quality, is a matter for our private lives only, is simply shortsighted. Compassion belongs to every sphere of activity, including, of course, the workplace. (Dalai Lama, 127).

            Here the Dalai Lama speaks of the necessity and importance of compassion. Elsewhere he speaks of the ubiquity and utility of compassion: “Because our capacity for empathy is innate, and because the ability to reason is also an innate faculty, compassion shares the characteristics of consciousness itself. The potential we have to develop it is therefore stable and continuous” (Ethics, 123-24). In Ethics for the New Millenium, the Dalai Lama provides a rich and deep articulation of what it can and should mean to be compassionate. He calls for us to question the rather petty and narrow interpretation of compassion that seems to dominate much of Western culture, and develops, in my humble opinion, a near-flawless formulation of personal compassion. I will shortly discuss the one glaring flaw in his approach after I have discussed the other two compassion theories, but right now I want to enlarge on the significance of the Dalai Lama’s teachings and how they relate to my theory on total change and the myth of permanence.  

            The Dalai Lama argues that compassion is the source and fruit of “love, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness” and that essentially the compassionate life is the meaningful and happy life, since compassionate thinking, words, and deeds provide the framework for the arising of the aforementioned virtues. This ties in to my claim that compassion is the center stone of the four concordive potentials, as I will show very shortly. He also writes that imagination plays a vital role in the effective fruition of compassion: “If we examine those actions which are uniquely human, which animals cannot perform, we find that this faculty plays a vital role…But the use to which it is put determines whether the actions it conceives are positive or negative, ethical or unethical” (72). In connection with my points on the other three potentials and our need for proper external conditions, imagination as a composite aspect of compassion is completely essential to growing our compassion, balancing our potentials, and self-evolving to a higher state of consciousness and presence as a species. What I draw from the Dalai Lama’s thoughts on imagination and compassion is that we need to recognize what kind of imaginative forces we are allowing to gain dominance in our lives, our thinking, speech, and behavior. We need to do this because our imagination colors and shapes everything we do and think as subjective beings. When we begin to monitor and choose our imagination in a positive way, we can gain more and more conscious control of our behavior and we can more and more easily take compassionate action. And compassionate action, as the Dalai Lama notes, generates more positive energy and more virtues in those who are both the practitioners and recipients of compassionate behavior. Imagining this universe and our role in it positively is the first step towards fully actualizing our compassion – and balancing and coordinating our concordive potentials. In this way, compassionate thoughts, words, and deeds serve as the orienting point for positive creative behavior and thinking, adapting compassionately to the environment around us, and accepting the changes these behaviors create for us and the world around us. In the second section I will take a more in-depth look at positive imagining and compassion and how exactly they work as I flesh out my concept of the syndividual. But now, having capped my discussion of the Dalai Lama, I am going to look at Christ’s compassion theory and look for some connections there.

            I really don’t even have to say what Christ is most famous for saying, but I am going to say it anyway, and I am also going to look a little bit at the context of his saying it – at the larger core of Christ’s compassion theory. There are two versions of Christ’s formulation, one in the Gospel of Matthew and one in the Gospel of Luke, and we will go with Luke because it is ever so slightly pithier. And to be fair to other religions, the Jewish prophet and leader Hillel, who was alive just before the rise of Christ, had a phrase in his repertoire of awesome phrases that was very similar to Christ’s. And indeed, the widespread nature of this sentiment (it occurs as well in pagan sources and in secular philosophy, such as Kant’s famous categorical imperative) points to the widespread acceptance, at least on the level of wisdom, of the inherent value and presence of compassion in human life. So here goes: “Do to others as you would have them to do to you” (Luke 6, 31-32). This seems a very simple and bare edict, almost like, “yeah, so, I knew that…,” and this is probably the case, at least in part, because we are so used to hearing one version of it or another. But it seems likely that many of us, myself included, have not taken enough time to more fully process the significance of this concept. It is so stunningly simple, so easy to pack away in the head without working into our daily lives what that message can mean for our lives and the lives of others. There is a near-infinity of wisdom in this simple phrase, and after looking more at the biblical context for Christ’s compassion theory, I would like to unpack some of the deeper significance of his teaching and its overall implications for my own theories in this essay.

            Around this phrase, in both Matthew and Luke, Jesus ties compassion in this universalizing sense (very close indeed to the sense the Dalai Lama invokes) to the worship and awareness of God. We are, for better or for worse, not so much interested in drawing a universal lesson from this, since such an attitude these days when construed as mandatory for humanity is more likely to cause strife and marches and gunfire then it is to cause positive global change. But what else does Christ talk about? Just before the Golden Rule in Luke, Christ provides some context for the enacting of the Golden Rule, and after calling for universal compassion, he harshly reprimands those who are compassionate in a more limited (and for us, familiar, sense). Before: “But to you who hear I say, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you” (6, 27-28). After: “For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them” (6, 32-33). Now to unpack that Golden Rule a little bit: Christ is telling us to perform our actions while being so aware of other people’s being and needs that those actions do not, to the best of our abilities, conflict with the presumable wellbeing of others. He wants us always to be performing the intellectual experiment of putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes, to deliberately shift our perspectives so we can more readily sense the implications of our actions for other people. Christ is telling us to be always imagining the lives of others as accurately and sensitively as we can so that when we take an action, that action is at least as positive for other people as it is for us. He is telling us to be imaginative and sensitive, and that these qualities are fundamental to successful and meaningful compassion. Without imagination and sensitivity, how can one be successful on a regular basis in taking compassionate action, in putting oneself in someone else’s shoes?

            To look at it in another way, Christ is calling on us to put all four of our concordive potentials to use in being compassionate and living a meaningful life: be creatively aware of others, adapt to this awareness and its significance in our lives, change your life on these principles, and you will be able to act often, if not always, out of compassionate concern. So two thousand years ago, Christ was telling people they already knew how to practice compassion when it was easy, but the more rewarding way to do it was to practice universal and imaginative compassion. And people loved it! Christianity kicked so much ass and this idea of universal love was… well, pretty much universally appealing (even if not universally practiced). This goes to show that compassion is definitely a core part of our being, whether we are atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists (especially Buddhists!), Christians, agnostics – we simply need the right conditions for our compassion to really shine. Christ and his message have helped to provide a particular version of those conditions for many people ever since he gave that famous Sermon on the Mount. But sadly those conditions are not universal, unlike the raw potential of compassion.

            Which brings us neatly to Mengzi. Mengzi argues that compassion is a fundamental part of human nature; and unlike Jesus and the Dalai Lama (at least in his Ethics for the New Millenium), Mengzi elaborates on the social and political conditions necessary for the flowering of compassion in society. For Mengzi, the social and political conditions he envisions are wedded to his vision of universal compassion, much as Christ’s vision was wedded to the worship of God. But we can accept and draw benefits from both aspects of Mengzi’s theory without accepting wholesale the total validity of his proposed social and political conditions, much as we drew from Christ without accepting (or rejecting) his theistic religiosity. On human nature, Mengzi writes:

As for what they [humans] are inherently, they can become good. This is what I mean by calling their natures good… As for their becoming not good, this is not the fault of their potential. Humans all have the feeling of compassion. Humans all have the feeling of disdain. Humans all have the feeling of respect. Humans all have the feeling of approval and disapproval. The feeling of compassion is benevolence. The feeling of disdain is righteousness. The feeling of respect is propriety. The feeling of approval and disapproval is wisdom. Benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom are not welded to us externally. We inherently have them. It is simply that we do not reflect upon them. Hence, it is said, ‘Seek it and you will get it. Abandon it and you will lose it.’ Some differ from others by two, five, or countless times – this is because they cannot fathom their potentials. (Mengzi 6A6.5-6.7)

Here the myth of permanence re-emerges as an issue again, since it has helped to hide from us our potentials: we have surrounded ourselves with a galaxy of distractions and with the strong bulwark of cynicism and jaded and staid complacency that is such a strong part of our zeitgeist. In order to overcome this bulwark, we must follow Mengzi here and reflect long and hard upon our potentials – and take action passed upon this reflection.

            Mengzi is much more linear than Christ, and more socially minded than the Dalai Lama, but between all three it is clear that compassion is one of our central features as human beings – and to borrow a Christian term but recast it in a secular mold, compassion should be the center-stone of our redemption. Mengzi blames the differences in the way humans manifest their compassion on social, political, and material environments, and in this I have to (mostly) agree. If we are to sincerely believe in our potential as a species, then we must believe in the significance that the social, political, and material elements must play in the success of our species. Mengzi says, “In years of plenty, most young men are gentle; in years of poverty, most young men are violent. It is not that the potential that Heaven confers on them varies like this. They are like this because of what sinks and drowns their hearts” (6A7.1). Generally speaking, Mengzi proposes as the remedy for poor social, political, and material environments that which men value in common: “What is it that hearts prefer in common? I say that it is order and righteousness” (6A8.1). More specifically Mengzi proposed a “benevolent government,” an ethically instructive educational system, a reinforcement of the value of reflection, and a whole suite of specific political actions for rulers to take, but we will not look into these last, since they are largely of so specific a nature that they will only detract from the foci of this essay (Norden xxv). But suffice it to say that much of what Mengzi has to say based on his theory of compassion could be quite profitably modified to serve as part of a framework for bringing about real and total change in our society. An ordered and righteous society certainly sounds good to me!

            Yet despite all the wisdom of Mengzi’s approach, we must remember that the change we seek will almost certainly have to encompass far more than the political, legal, social, and material changes that a purely Mengzian approach would advocate. But between the three accounts of compassion I have examined there exists a stable tripod of theory and practice that extends back across more than two thousand years and, if we include the spread of Buddhism and Christianity, across all the inhabited continents. And as the Dalai Lama notes, “All the world’s major religions stress the importance of cultivating love and compassion” (Ethics 123). This near-universality of an emphasis on compassion only further endorses my claims about compassion, but perhaps even more importantly, compassion is the sort of attitude that inherently encourages comity and compromise. This means that while I have only sketched out a tripod of theories on compassion as a way of demonstrating the viability of universal compassionate practice in our time, that practice has at its fingertips a world-wide body of theories and practices it can syncretistically draw upon and synthesize into a secular and universally utilizable theory of compassion that can also satisfy disparate religious and cultural beliefs. 

            All this jazz about compassion and commonalities and the core elements of humanity is one long DNA strand meant to point out one thing: the idea that we can’t change the world is a myth perpetuated by institutions, ignorance, tradition, and above all, fear. If total change is to come (and we are the ones who must bring it upon ourselves, not cosmic superheroes, aliens, Jesus, movie stars and philanthropists answering the real-world version of the batman signal, nor the four horsemen of the apocalypse – no one wants to see them come anyway!) we must look to our mutability, adaptability, creativity, and compassion for the solutions. Our compassion will have to be deep, and we will need to be creative in the ways we use it and conceive of it. We will have to be willing to change ourselves in the name of compassion, creativity, adaptability, and mutability. And we will have to adapt, to accept and understand the significance and value of our own creativeness, our own compassion and mutability. Cuz baby, I think a change would do you good.

            After all, we know we are not a perfect species, but that is no excuse for saying we cannot do a much better job improving the likelihood of our improving as a species. That is the myth of permanence talking; that is the negative imagination parading before our eyes. We can change. And by “can” I mean it is in our immediate grasp, it awaits only the momentous realization of a strong minority of a single generation for us to take the first discernible and self-knowing steps towards radically progressing as a species. We can choose from a pre-existing wide array of possible habits, diets, exercise regimes, institutions, climates, social surroundings, rhetorical environments, political structures, etc., all of which go towards shaping the manifestations of our humanity. And to top it off, we can invent (and are constantly devising meta-inventions, new ways to create inventions or to manipulate the manipulators of our environment) new forms of these in case the existing habits and diets and institutions are not effective enough for us.

            So we have evolved to the point where we can choose the grounds of our evolution to a remarkable degree. We can self-evolve, and I do not simply mean this in a physical way (though the sinister implications of this possibility are growing more apparent by the day). We can evolve socially, psychologically, spiritually – if we want to. And we will only want to if we see the benefits, and believe in their possibility. The myth of permanence radically denies this possibility – but it is a shitty lie. We can change in two key ways, and this is where I will be discussing the Dalai Lama’s one major deficiency in his compassion theory: 1) we can change as individuals by changing the way we imagine the world and thereby truly engendering our compassion. This is the first step. 2) But we can also change, and we must change, the external world around us. The Dalai Lama discusses compassion almost exclusively from an individualistic perspective; he calls for personal compassion, but he speaks very little about the importance and necessity of vast social, institutional, and global change. This is where Mengzi’s theory helps us out, since he is the theorist who specifically targets the external conditions that give rise to our actual expressions of being. He acknowledges that our families, institutions, traditions, economies, and other environmental factors strongly condition the ways in which our potentials do and do not become actualities.

            So how do we overcome this second hurdle to total change? The first hurdle is difficult enough. Surely we are not all called to become revolutionaries and activists? While the second section of this essay will more thoroughly address this question, I can say here that there are ways for all of us to be involved in jumping over that second hurdle, of changing our total conditioning environment without giving up our vocations or rejecting our families and taking vows of poverty. Just as the Dalai Lama’s vision of compassion does not require us to give up all the personal aspects of our lives, my vision does not call for all of us to become professional revolutionaries and full-time volunteers. 

Section II: Concordive Potentials

     I am going to mark out four concordive potentials that, when actualized, can help us to create and maintain states of organic and balanced concord, peace, and vitality with ourselves and the rest of the planet. There are obviously other concordive potentials, but these are the four I believe to be the most central to our total ability as a species to dramatically change our behavior and presence, and as I noted, this essay is meant only to sketch out my position on these concerns, not to be a completely thorough-going inquiry.  

These four concordive potentials or capacities are: our mutability, our adaptability, our creativity, and our compassion. The first three potentials are, I think, fairly obvious and almost commonplace in the sense that most of us are aware of – and even proud of – our mutability, adaptability, and creativity as human beings. Yet various forms of the myth of permanence have largely obscured the full concordive implications of those three potentials – implications I will examine shortly. But compassion is the most contentious, the most important, and the least understood of the concordive potentials, and deserves the most discussion. Indeed, my discussion of compassion will ultimately ground the principles upon which I will present my claims for total change and the syndividual in the second section of this essay. But first I need to discuss the other three potentials and how they contradict the myth of permanence, since that discussion will help to provide a needed context for understanding the concept of concordive potential, and understanding how these potentials are much deeper and richer than has been previously recognized.  

The first potential is perhaps the most obviously universal – and yet it is the most under-appreciated and ambiguously perceived as a concordive potential. So let’s talk about the obvious first: human societies are incredibly mutable. As Erich Fromm wrote, “man, in contrast to the animal, shows an almost infinite malleability; just as he can eat almost anything, live under practically any kind of climate and adjust himself to it, there is hardly any psychic condition which he cannot endure, and under which he cannot carry on” (The Sane Society, 26). The existence of such radically different societies as the Innuit, Aztec, Han Chinese, Hellenic Greek, Republican and Empirical Roman societies (not to mention the thousands of other societies that have graced the Earth) patently demonstrate the broad scope of possible human societies. And the explosion of technological and general innovations in the last century only further reinforces the inescapable conclusion that we have only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploring all the facets of human potential and human organizational capacities. 

This leads to the second feature of mutability I initially mentioned: the mutability of humanity is often perceived ambiguously or seen as merely a neutral feature – a quality awaiting further dispositions and influences before it takes its settled form, a quality as likely to lead to chaos and strife as to order and peace. This claim, while true, commits an ontological blunder: it picks out our mutability as a stand-alone trait to be evaluated and considered on its own. This is the issue with the nurture versus nature argument when it comes to our mutability. Both arguments reify our mutability: it is a potential that only exists in relationship to other potentials and actualities, and is not a stand-alone potential. This is true of all our potentials, indeed of everything in existence, and rather than enter into a lengthy ontological debate I will simply recommend the reader peruse the Buddhist and Taoist classics on the subjects of interdependence and existence, of which my claim is a variant. Each of our potentials and whether and how it becomes actualized, whether it is a concordive or discordive potential, conditions and affects our other potentials and their actualization or lack thereof. However, our potentials form clusters of relationships: potentials that tend to have concordive and discordive relationships with other potentials. This is precisely the reason for discussing the four concordive potentials as a group: they cannot adequately be seen as either concordive or discordive without being conceived in relationship with other potentials and actualities of human nature and the environment that surrounds us. So in the context of our creativity, adaptability, and compassion, our mutability is a concordive potential, since if we use our creativity, adaptability, and compassion to craft a beautiful society and live full, meaningful, and peaceful lives, our mutability will allow us to accept this life without reverting quickly or easily to a more atavistic lifestyle. On the other hand, if we choose to associate our mutability as necessarily associated with our greedy and violent and deceptive potentials, then of course our mutability will be a discordive potential. 

In this profound way our nature and our flowering as beings is up to us: we can choose how to perceive and emphasize those relationships between potentials and actualities of our nature. I choose to see the positive relationships, and I argue for the rest of us to do the same. The positive relationships between our potentials are possible: do we want to make them a reality for the many and not just the few, or is this edenic vision too blasphemous for our fearful hearts? Now is the time to cast aside fear, which has no more claim to verity than does hope – and to live with strength, vision, and hope. 

The second potential is our adaptability. Mutability here is simply the raw malleability of our nature when seen in the context of our creativity, compassion, and adaptability, all emphasized and conceived as a self-reinforcing constellation in our hearts to be brought forth consistently into the world. Adaptability is distinct from mutability in that it is our ability to find the strength of will and the fortitude to survive and to find meaning and value in a vast variety of environments and conditions. In a way, curiosity is often a subset of our adaptive potential, in that it allows us to find value and meaning in exploration and discovery. To avoid reification, it is necessary to note that adaptability is a composite potential: courage, curiosity, invention, and fortitude all play their part in forming the appearance of this one potential. But in this discussion of total change and the myth of permanence, it is more fruitful to treat this ability to find meaning and to survive physically and spiritually in a broad array of environments as a somewhat distinct concordive potential. 

Examples of the universal nature of our adaptability abound – the same broad plethora of societies I mentioned before points to our adaptability as much as to our mutability, but countless individual examples of perseverance and adaptability in extreme circumstances abound as well: Nelson Mandela’s nearly 30 years in prison, Auang San Suu Kyi’s long struggle with the military authorities of Burma, the revolutionaries in the British Colonies who fought for independence and created the United States of America. Indeed, even fictional examples of adaptability and all its composite qualities I mentioned, such as courage, curiosity, invention, and fortitude, serve to prove my claim that adaptability is a universal potential in us all, since fiction derives much of its appeal from the verisimilitude in its portrayal of this very human trait. One of my favorite examples of adaptability in fiction is in the movie The Two Towers. I am thinking of the scene where Aragorn convinces King Theoden, surrounded by 10,000 orcs and on the verge of absolute ruin and defeat, to sound the legendary horn of Helm Hammerhand and ride out to defeat the orcs and the dark armies of Saruman. There is adaptiveness abounding in this scene, and it is so stirring a scene in good part because it rings true – it awakens within us our own sense of dignity in having such courage and adaptability ourselves, even if we usually express our adaptability in less dramatic circumstances.

 

But of course people can claim our adaptability is discordive as much as I am claiming it is concordive. But that is because we have let it be discordive, we have at times closed our hearts to concordive possibilities and seen only the dark relationships within and without. This is, indeed, a real-world point that I believe Tolkein makes throughout his trilogy - that we can use our adaptability for good or evil, and this is a question of vision, not potential. Our adaptability, if given the right environment and coaching, can enable us to put to effective use the tools that our creativity creates and our compassion guides us to apply. If we trust in our compassion, creativity, and mutability (and by ‘we believe’ I mean we individually believe in our collective abilities to be effectively compassionate, creative, adapative, and mutable) we can adapt ourselves to letting go of fear and of our deep assumptions about the darkness inside of us and around us. And we can find meaning and truth in a newer and better world – an abiding sense of meaning and truth.    

The third concordive potential is our creativity. Creativity is distinct from adaptability in that where adaptability is rooted in surviving (spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically), creativity is rooted in creating and exploring the universe’s possibilities. This potential also has its various dimensions – the spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical, and the innumerable beyond; and in many ways, adaptiveness and creativity are deeply linked potentials. Much of the meaning we find in life, that meaning-making and defiance against the sense of meaningless and destruction that so frequently characterizes adaptiveness, is meaning we first discover and awaken through imagination, through our various creative impulses and acts. What creativity discovers and fashions, adaptiveness grasps onto and brings (or does not) into the meaningful center of our lives. Our creativity is one of the central forces responsible for our art, our spirituality, our intellectual lives, our sciences – all the products of man, all the artifices and manipulations of the reality adaptability is a composite potential: courage, curiosity, invention, and fortitude all play their part in forming the appearance of this one potential. But in this discussion of total change and the myth of permanence, it is more fruitful to treat this ability to find meaning and to survive physically and spiritually in a broad array of environments as a somewhat distinct concordive potential.

     Our creativity is very obvious as a universal quality, but its profound nature, especially in relationship with the other concordive potentials, has historically been under-appreciated and under-utilized. Much of our creativity, in terms of the products and systems of creativity, has been conceived in terms of the individual systems they appear to represent unto themselves. In this way, much art is typically approached as art for its own sake; much religious and spiritual discourse and activity is approached as religion and spirituality for its own sake; technology for its own sake, on its own terms. We take or leave these activities, we appreciate or denigrate these creative systems based on the values and benefits these systems articulate for and unto themselves. We frequently (but not always) take their internal claims to be sufficient for understanding their values and uses in our lives and in adapting them to our lifestyles. So technology claims value in being able to make our lives easier and less fraught with suffering and difficulty – and by and large we accept this claim in our use or rejection of technological products. The arts, (at least modern theorists and artists) including literature, music, the performing arts, and the visual arts, claim in different ways to offer value in satisfying our ‘artistic’ needs as either artists and writers or readers and purveyors of art – and we accept this claim in our appreciation and use, dissatisfaction and disuse of the systems and products of the arts. The same for religions, spiritual movements, academia, sports, and so on. 

The problem here is that by taking the validity of these system’s claims for granted, without moderation and adaptation to everything else we value and seek in life, we are shortchanging ourselves. We are not properly actualizing our adaptability and mutability as human beings here, since we are not sufficiently utilizing our compassionate potential. All four potentials shine forth brightest when they are considered and actualized in a balanced and self-aware relationship with each other. This is a general grievance, thankfully, and not a universally true one (people do independently assess the claims of our creative products and systems, just not nearly enough). But it seriously underscores the problems we face in coming to terms with all our potentials, especially our concordive ones. The creative potential of humanity, and the products it yields, cannot be approached as self-sufficient and independent entities or processes if we are to actually achieve total change and expose the myth of permanence for what it is. They must be seen as necessary and mutable parts of a whole relationship between all the potentials we seek to actuate and all the actualities we wish to dispel (war, global poverty, famine, wide-spread greed, etc.). So technology and its products cannot be seen simply as devices to make our lives easier and more pleasant. Such an attitude, if seriously pursued or even complacently accepted, deprives us of the ability to see more compassionate and adaptive uses of technology that the technological system itself might not prescribe – it encourages us to use technologies without an eye for the broader implications of those uses in our lives and the lives of others and the life of the universe around us. The same critique can be made of all our creative systems, from art to politics, from sports to television. We need to be able to see these systems and products, and all our own personal creative endeavors and impulses, as part of a whole relationship between our other potentials, needs, and desires as human beings, and our overall place in the universe. And we can do this. We just have to accept that there is a balance to strike, there is a union to be forged between our compassionate aspects and our creative aspects, our adaptive and our mutable potentials – and we are not there yet, but we can be.

I will post Section 3, which is an extended discussion of the concordive potential for compassion, next week. Please feel free to comment or to post a link to this blog on your facebook pages (or other social media pages) if you are interested in this discussion. Also please feel free to post links to related blogs, discussions, organizations and the like here or on my Manbeard facebook page!

 

Total Change by Manbeard. 

Mixed Media: acrylic, charcoal, pastel, and colored pencil. Copyright 2012

Note: I will be posting this essay in five sections. This is the first of those sections. You can email me at mannbeard@gmail.com for a PDF version of the essay in its entirety.

Total Change and the Myth of Permanence

            This essay is a sketch (or in more philosophical terms, a prolusion) on the general theme of positive global change. As a sketch this essay will focus on an inter-related cluster of concerns related to this theme, and will seek to spell out those concerns and their connections to one another and the core concept of positive global change. I will divide the clusters of concerns into two central clusters, and consequently will be dividing the essay into two primary sections: (I) the myth of permanence and (II) total change. (I) My opening concern is the myth of permanence – a myth that has successfully prevented many of us from dedicating significant aspects of our lives to erecting positive global change. After I have explained this myth and its consequences, I will show how it is indeed a myth and not a competent and healthy perception of reality. I will show this by demonstrating that humanity as a whole has core positive characteristics that form a significant portion of our nature, and that the real problem we face is not one of potential but of vision and actualization. For the actualization of these potentials is largely dependent on external conditions over which we cumulatively wield a great deal of control currently, but have not always done so. More importantly, we have frequently lacked an adequate vision of our potentials and our goals as a people, one that would have enabled us to be at peace with ourselves and the environment for very long at all. I will then argue that in order for us to manifest our positive potentials consistently and coherently as a people, we require a near-universal vision of our potentials and goals. I aim to provide this vision in this essay; in this way we can make the positive global changes I will be describing generally in the second section. According to the concerns of this essay, the chief among the positive potentials is our compassion. This is because compassion is the potential that is perhaps our greatest single potential, but it is also our most fickle in terms of its manifestation, and is the most misunderstood and most questioned of our potentials. To address these questions and concerns and to firmly root the exposure of the myth and to make way for the second half of the essay, I will engage in an extended discussion of our key potentials, centered on our potential for compassion. After this I will then demonstrate how we have reached a stage in our evolution in which we can and need to control those external conditions and channel our compassion and other positive potentials to an extent greater than ever before. I then briefly outline the two major hurdles we face in changing our presence on the planet, which I discuss more fully in the context of total change and the syndividual in the second section. (II) In the second section I will argue that the kind of change we need to aim for must take the form of total change across virtually all spectrums and aspects of human life – and we must do it primarily from the inside out – by changing our desires and our thinking about what constitutes the good life and how best it can be achieved and protected. As my contribution to the necessary discussions that will have to arise before such changes can become widespread, I will then lay out my tentative and general concept of the syndividual and the changes I hope this concept can help engender in our species. In this context I discuss the two hurdles we must face in order to change first ourselves and then the world around us: 1) changing our imagination from a closed and negative one to a positive and open one; and 2) changing our external conditions through syndividualistic action. I will break down the discussion of syndividualistic action into the two aspects of (I) communication and (II) institutional creation, use, and participation. I will then summarize the overall concerns and claims of the essay and conclude with a renewed and enriched final assessment of our current status as a species and where we are headed and can be headed on this planet.

            As a personal note, I am sketching these concepts out so that in a short space these concerns can stand together as vitally connected concerns and not as stand-alone, piecemeal concerns. I too want to play my part in the changes of which I write, and for me adumbrating these concerns in this rough, loose, and relatively brief fashion leaves room for me to leave my ego and stark individualism at the door to discussion and contemplation. It also leaves room for others to contribute, adjust, and evolve these concepts and the overall discussion in which my concerns take their place without the overt need for prolonged and laborious philosophical study, or for egoistic striving, or for potentially divisive and partisan competition. I write here in the name of growth for us all. I do not write to vainly seek my advantages, to blow up my pride, to mark myself out as one who has thought nobly on these things – I am one of many who live and love imperfectly, but have gifts to share, and are as ready to receive and understand as we are to give of ourselves. I wish by this to make our world brighter, to share my light with the light of the world, to let my darknesses away and to help if I can to ease away your darknesses too. So let us share our beauties and gifts in joy, not in divisive and destructive competition.

I

The Myth of Permanence

            There is a pervasive sense throughout the Western world, but particularly in American society, that we inhabit a settled world – a collection of roughly static and unchangeable societies. When we are young and hungry for life and change, when we are just becoming individuals and are busy finding and settling into our places in life, we often see situations we find morally unsatisfactory and on some profound level avoidable, such as global poverty, global pollution, AIDS, state-endorsed violence, racism, bureaucratic ineptitude, wide-spread political deceit and cynicism, and the like. This list is actually quite extensive; and as time passes and we devise more and more technologies and ways to manipulate the world around us, the list of perturbing and seemingly avoidable human activities that grate at some part of our core being seems to only increase. “Where are we going?,” we wonder to ourselves and to other seemingly like-minded souls. What is humanity doing to itself and the world around it? Where will we be in 100 years?

            The answers we give ourselves when young differ dramatically from the answers society at large gives us, from the answers most of our elders give us, even from the answers our peers give us once they have settled in the menagerie of society. Those first answers, those answers from our own innocent young hearts, were almost always ones of hope. Blinding hope. Hope for a great and beautiful world in which we as humans can be happy together with the rest of the world. With the tigers and the trees, happy with the blue sky, happy with the green grass and clear clean rivers. But it is a hope without duration, a hope frequently without direction and without sufficient confidence to mark our path in life as charged and ready to change this world together for the better, the definitively and beautifully better. The answers of the latter, varied and often times unspoken or inarticulate, oft-presented in the form of rejection, coaxing, teasing, and an overwhelming (but illusionary, I assure you) sense of necessity, are profoundly disheartening. Thud goes our hope, down to the bottom of the well. Life as we see it becomes life as we know it. This is, fortunately, not a true situation for all of us – but it is true for the vast majority of us. Becoming an adult in the accepted sense means accepting society for what it is, and struggling to find our best and most comfortable place in it – if we can. Becoming a complete person means channeling your talents to find a job and a family (if you want one), and letting go of those marvelous but vain and youthful dreams of real and meaningful change. If the world moves, you move with it. It doesn’t move because of you.

            Those answers are perpetuations of a big, fat, ugly lie. A myth. The myth of permanence: the myth that we are permanently destined as a species to live a life of mass conflict, depredation, greed, and ignorance. Most of us don’t know it is a lie, but most of us also feel a slight tickling in the back of our mind when we tell our children, our friends, our colleagues, our enemies, “people don’t change,” “ha, what are you going to do? Change the world?,” “Please, face up to reality!,” “Get real,” or, my personal favorite, “Get a job!” If we were Pinocchios, whenever we felt that tickling, our noses would be growing. Most of us might very well have small trees growing from our faces right now. Because we have been telling ourselves and others that if we want to change things, we can change jobs, we can change technologies, we can make meaningful art, we can write great books, we can make or join non-profit organizations, we can volunteer – but we can’t change society. We can’t change who we are as human beings. We’re stuck with the same crappy material that we have had for millennia, and we can only change the size and appearance of the tubes out of which we squeeze our crappy selves. But we are still crappy, greedy, angry, gullible, violent, (and now, disillusioned), forgetful, vindictive little turds. So we might as well make the best of it!

            I’ll tell you what is really the little turd – that myth we have been telling each other. It is the invisible set of handcuffs binding us to our ignorant past, to the mistakes of our ancestors. What makes me so sure it is a myth? Because history tells me so. Because the Dalai Lama tells us so. Because wise men and women across all ages and continents, from Lao Tzu and Rumi to Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Jefferson, from Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Aung San Suu Kyi and Vaclav Havel have told us so. Because my own eyes, my own ears, my young heart, and my heart and mind now have told me. We have enough potential and actual good in us to overcome our adversities and to mark out an increasingly brighter future for ourselves and for the planet. But we have had two consistent problems preventing us from successfully using what I call our concordive potentials: 1) an inadequate guiding perception of our potentials, both concordive and discordive; and 2) an insufficient, incoherent, and inconsistent species-wide history of actualizing our concordive potentials. So despite what the myth of permanence claims, the problem we really face is not a problem of potential; it is a problem of vision and actualization.

            In terms of vision, the myth of permanence is merely the newest version of the countless ruling cultural perceptions that have clouded our vision throughout our history and mitigated and diffused our will as a species. Rarely before has even a single society had a sufficient vision of humanity’s potentials to motivate its members to cumulatively act towards securing a reign of significant and sustainable peace, equity, and wide-spread wellbeing. And when a society, such as the Aborigines of Australia, has actually achieved such a union of vision and praxis, at some point that society has run into conflict with at least one other society (such as the European would-be conquerors of Australia) whose vision of our potentials and the good life has led to interminable conflict with both the environment and other human beings, and the end of the previous edenic era. Yet we have entered into a heretofore-unseen period of world-wide interconnectivity and technological power that spells the end of such former kinds of vision-isolation and vision-conflict. Now the time has come, as I shall discuss in the second section, for either vision-convergence and cooperation, or the ultimate destruction of most life on the planet, human and otherwise.

            In terms of actualization, the inconsistent and incoherent actualization of our potentials has actually helped to inform the myth of permanence, but as I noted, the myth is but a version of the problematic visions that have dominated most discordant societies the planet has seen, such as the Romans, the Greeks, the Chinese, and the Aztecs. And it takes an adequate vision of our potentials to motivate an entire society (and for this discussion, our species) to take the steps necessary to actualize our concordive potentials and create a state of stable and sustainable concord both among humans and with the surrounding environment. Up until now the interconnected modern world has lacked a united vision adequate to both our potentials and to our pluralities of religion, lifestyle, culture, and political structures that will enable us to act cumulatively to achieve worldwide peace, wellbeing, and sustainability. This essay seeks to address this lack, and to set forth both a vision of our concordive potentials that can be the seed of total and positive change, and a general vision of what this change should look like. The two aspects of this vision correspond to the two sections of this essay. This vision recognizes and aims to allow for the kind of plurality and non-destructive individualistic behavior that has come to characterize much of our modern vision of the good life, but it also seeks to curb the destructive attitudes and behavior that have also come to characterize our modernity.

Next week: Section 2: Our Concordive Potentials.